Research Forum 2003

Susan Talburt
Georgia State University

Ideas of a University, Governmentality, and Faculty Governance

This paper theorizes the relations of faculty members’ subjectivities as academics to their participation in university governance. I begin with the premise that changes in universities brought on by corporatization create conditions that affect faculty members’ understandings of their work and identities. Institutions and individuals are increasingly called on to generate funding and participate in decision-making about issues (e.g., distance learning, competitive marketing of programs, intellectual property and technology transfer, enrollment management, and revised criteria for promotion and tenure) that raise questions about the purposes and meanings of universities and faculty work, which corporatization defines through the lens of economic utility. With intensified norms for what faculty should do (for example, generate prestige and revenue through sponsored research), shifts in reward structures and symbolic status occur that contribute to shaping their actions and subjectivities. Ideas such as “merit,” “autonomy,” “community of scholars,” “collegiality,” and “common good” that have traditionally defined the university and faculty work continue to circulate, but are refigured in their meanings in ways that bear on faculty members’ academic subjectivities and the substance of their participation in governance. In developing this inquiry that traverses texts by and about academics, the academy, and governance, I presume that faculty simultaneously are positioned by and position themselves in relation to these changes. Foucault’s idea of “governmentality,” which includes the ways social institutions endeavor to guide, shape, and direct behavior and the ways individuals govern themselves and their actions, becomes a useful concept for understanding how faculty move between governing the self as “individual” academics and governing the self as “governors,” or participants in governance. In other words, “governmentality” offers a conceptual fulcrum for understanding how faculty live out simultaneous roles as objects and subjects of the academy and, thus, insights into the limits and possibilities of shared governance in an ongoing moment of academic corporatization.